In a mobile communications network, a mobile station (MS) may send various communications to a base station (BS). Such communication may include information regarding a changing condition of a communications channel between the MS and the BS. This channel information may include, for example, a physical carrier-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (PCINR), an effective CINR (ECINR), and a received signal strength indicator (RSSI).
Further, the channel information sent from the MS to the BS may include, for instance, a channel quality indicator (CQI). A CQI is a measurement of a quality of the communication channel between the MS and the BS. A CQI can be a value representing a measure of the quality for a given channel, where a high value of the CQI is indicative of a channel with a high quality and vice versa. A CQI for a channel may be determined based on performance metrics, such as, for example, a signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR), a signal-to-noise plus distortion ratio (SNDR), of the channel. A CQI for a channel can also be dependent upon transmission (modulation and coding) schemes used by a mobile communications network. For instance, a network using code-division multiple access (CDMA) can utilize a different CQI than a network using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM).
However, to send channel information from a MS to a BS, frequency and time dimension sub-channels between user devices (including the MS) and the BS must be allocated to send such channel information. Since the frequency sub-channels are capacity-limited, as more of the sub-channels are allocated to send channel information between the single MS and the BS, less of the sub-channels can be allocated to other user devices. As such, the sending of channel information from the MS to the BS adversely affects a total number of active users that can be supported by a mobile communications network, thereby decreasing user experience.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.